Various prior art monitoring and management systems were developed during the last decade. These systems were able to detect an occurrence of an event and respond by performing a predefined action. These systems were memory-less systems in the sense that the predefined actions were responsive to currently occurring events, and not responsive to events that occurred in the past.
The following U.S. patents and patent applications, all being incorporated herein by reference, illustrates some prior art systems and methods: U.S. patent application publication serial number 2002/0049691 of Majoor titled “Mechanism and method for continuous operation of a rule server”, U.S. Pat. No. 6,856,980 of Feldman et al., titled “Hybrid use of rule and constraint engines”; U.S. patent application publication serial number 2003/0163783 of Chikirivao et al., titled “System and method for developing rules utilized in a knowledge management system”; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,847,957 of Morley titled “Dynamically extensible rule-based expert-system shell for database-computing environments”.
Events as well as responses were defined by one or more rule. Definition updates included shutting down the system and re-initializing the system. In highly complex systems that can support a very large number of rules the initialization process can be time consuming.
Various management systems (as well as monitoring systems) are required to be highly available and work continuously over very long time periods. There is a growing need to perform rules updates without substantially disturbing the operation of the system.